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AAAS Elects Five NYU Faculty as 2010 Fellows

April 21, 2010
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The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has elected five New York University faculty as fellows: Philosophy Professor Don Garrett, Economics Professor Mark Gertler, History Professor Greg Grandin, as well as Andrew Majda and Jalal Shatah, professors in NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

The five are among the 229 Fellows elected this year. Others include the following: U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Groves; National Endowment for the Humanities Chair James Leach; actors John Lithgow and Denzel Washington; and,director Francis Ford Coppola. A complete list of the 2010 class of new members is located here.

Garrett works primarily in the history of early modern philosophy, with special interests in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. He is the author of Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy and numerous articles. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, and he has served as co-editor of Hume Studies and North American editor of Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. Garrett has recently been named Carnegie Centenary Professor by the National Trust for the Universities of Scotland.

Gertler,the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Economics at NYU, is an expert on business cycles and monetary policy and a long-time collaborator and friend of Federal Reserve Chairman Benjamin Bernanke. Together, Gertler and Bernanke developed the “financial accelerator theory.” The theory characterizes how feedback between financial conditions and business activity can enhance overall fluctuations in the Gross Domestic Product. Gertler is among the 20 most cited economists in the world based on Research Papers in Economics, a database which provides statistical analysis of the professional publications and citation records of leading economists.

Grandin, an expert in Latin American history, is the author ofFordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The work, which chronicles a little-known Ford endeavor aimed at creating an American company town in the Brazilian, was picked by the New York Times, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and NPR for their “best of” lists while Amazon.com named it the best history book of 2009. Grandin is also the author of: Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Empire; The LastColonial Massacre: Latin America During the Cold War; and, Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation.

Majda, the Samuel F.B. Morse Professor of Arts and Sciences at the Courant Institute, is well-known for his theoretical contributions to partial differential equations and his applied contributions to a range of areas, including shock waves, combustion, and atmosphere ocean science. Majda is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has received numerous honors and awards including the National Academy of Science Prize in Applied Mathematics, the John von Neumann Prize of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Gibbs Prize of the American Mathematical Society.

Shatah is best known for his work on stability and regularity of nonlinear waves. Co-author of Geometric Wave Equations, Shatah introduced several new methods and techniques into the study of dispersive waves. His pioneering work on normal forms in partial differential equations (PDE) has led to major progress in the study of nonlinear evolution equations, where many of the now-standard techniques have their origin rooted in his methods. Shatah has co-authored several foundational papers on the subjects of stability of solitary waves in the presence of symmetry and geometric wave equations. His work on and formulation of these problems served as a psychological breakthrough that opened the door to enable the solution of many open problems in this field.

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 9, at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and others, AAAS has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel Laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.